


While you sleep

by Splinter



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Dreams, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Gardens & Gardening, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Kissing, Mutual Pining, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-10
Updated: 2018-05-10
Packaged: 2019-05-04 23:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14603757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Splinter/pseuds/Splinter
Summary: Everybody dreams. Everybody wants.For this awesome prompt byconfucamus: "Dreams as communication. Max and Furiosa dream of each other. Ghost Nux visits Capable as she sleeps. Ghost Keeper of Seeds tries to impart some knowledge to dreaming Dag. Ghost Rictus visits his brother for a final farewell. Angharad says farewell to her sisters"





	While you sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [confucamus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/confucamus/gifts).



Max and Furiosa are cuddled together, close and safe. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she feels a sense of wonder at it. The sisters fall naturally into puppy piles, but she’s used to holding herself apart, guarded and ready for attack. 

It must be even stranger for Max. On the road, he had recoiled from accidental contact, retreated if anyone got too close. When he relaxed a little, he’d been shaken awake by nightmares. He turned down her offer of a bike, insisting that he made his own way. Then, she remembers, he’d blurted out a warning about hope, so abrupt she couldn’t tell if he was trying to connect or putting up another barrier. Yet he had given her his blood, and his name, and let himself touch her. 

So she’s been told, anyway. She was barely conscious, too weak and sick to remember any of it afterwards.

“We thought you were dying,” Cheedo had said, always the frankest when it comes to explanations. “It was awful. He stabbed you and the noise was….” Bad, whatever it was, judging by the face she pulls at the memory. “But he knew what he was doing,” she added, as it occurred to her that this might not have been the best thing to tell a recovering invalid. “He was really gentle. Like he was terrified of breaking you.”

He doesn’t seem terrified now. It’s warm and quiet, the space they’ve created together, sheltered from the violence of the wasteland. He’s even taken his jacket off, nothing but thin fabric between them. Furiosa burrows closer, leaning into him, the bulk of his body cradling hers.

Max hums as she snuggles in, a buzz of sound that she can feel moving through his torso. He shifts his arm around her, adjusting to her new position, hand stroking her shoulders. It makes her sigh in pleasure, being touched and held like this.

After a moment, she slides her hand up to cup his face. He doesn’t spook, and nor does she, even when the heel of her hand rests against the steady pulse in his throat. His stubble is rough under her fingertips. 

His heart is beating with the same blood that’s inside her. Her Mothers would tell her that it doesn’t work like that, that the body renews itself, but that’s not how it feels. She knows that his blood warmed her back to life, that something of him is still simmering under her skin. 

His eyes open, a deep dark blue, even in this dim light. He is looking at her, and down at her mouth. With his face so close, it’s easy to glance down at his very full lips, so soft in the brown scruff of his face. She’s not sure which of them leans in, but she’s kissing him, so simple to do, and so sweet.

The kiss is slow and almost lazy, until she licks at his lips and feels them open for her. His pulse is faster under her hand, her own heart thumping. Her body feels alert and aware – not quite the adrenaline buzz of a fight, something just as strong but coming from this place of safety. Her skin is tingling where she touches him. She squeezes her thighs together. 

Max is murmuring between kisses, both of them pressing closer, inch by inch. Furiosa hooks her leg up over his hip, wanting to wrap herself around him, to feel if his body is responding too.

She tips over to find nothing there, the dream vanishing as she wakes. She’s alone in her empty bed, her heart still beating fast, with nowhere to hide from what she’s feeling.

She misses him. He’s returned twice, both short visits. They’d welcomed him, shown him the changes they’ve been making. She’d watched him shake away some of his twitches, until something triggered his fears and he took off again. Without the fury of a road war, it had taken longer to fall into their shared rhythm, though the pulse had still been there.

He’s turned up in her dreams before, but not in a way that mattered, just the usual jumble of past and present, people she knows and things she remembers. Not like this. She has already admitted to herself – half-prompted by the sisters’ teasing – that Max is attractive, in a general way. A gruff and scruffy way. She hadn’t admitted that she wants him: him, not just his appealing face and efficient physique, but Max himself. Now her mind and body are making decisions for her, when she’s defenceless in sleep. 

Her room looks blue-grey in the moonlight. She wonders where in the desert he is: if he’s safe, if he’s awake. Lying in bed, she runs her hand up her own torso. She’s trying to ground herself, but also letting herself imagine how he might touch her, how her body might seem to him. Her fingers come to rest on the scar on her ribs. Where he’d stabbed her, so close to where she can feel her own heart beating. She wants.

***

Toast is dreaming. It’s confused and uncertain, moments and flashes of memory, things she knows she can’t change, but it isn’t a nightmare. She’s sleeping in the former Vault tonight, fresh out of the infirmary, where she’d been recovering from a wound. The fever has passed, the stitches holding nicely, but the Vuvalini doctors had agreed that a few days of filtered air wouldn’t hurt. 

She’d been wary of coming back to this space, but it’s changed so much. There are more plants, the steel door taken away for scrap. More beds have been added. It’s quiet in here tonight, just Toast and a former milking mother with her baby, curled up in a larger bed on on the far side of the space, near the arc of glass. To her own muzzy surprise, Toast had fallen asleep readily, but she’s not sleeping easy.

She remembers her own hand, gripping the fabric of Angharad’s dress, helping to support her as she leaned right out of the cab of the war rig. Toast remembers the lift of her sister’s chin as she defied Joe, shielding Furiosa with her body, with her unborn baby. Capable and Toast had held on so tight. If only they could have held on longer, kept her safe. 

It hadn’t always been that simple. She remembers their fights, as they planned the escape, shouting about killing and unnecessary killing. Angharad had an unerring way of getting under her skin.

Toast doesn’t talk much – less than her sisters, who have so many words to spare. Capable will pour them out, so much milk of human kindness. The Dag is sharp and strange. Cheedo says what she thinks without the slightest guard, not thinking ahead for what reaction she’s likely to get. Toast will prod, but it’s always a probe, an attempt to dig out a response. 

Almost always. With Angharad, she would forget herself and just yell. There were times they barely spoke to each other, both so angry. Now she would give half the water in the aquifer to have her sister back. She’s aware, even as she thinks it, that Angharad would disapprove of such a selfish waste of resources.

“I would,” agrees Angharad, but her voice is at its fondest. “And so would you.” 

When Toast opens her eyes, Angharad is sitting there, Splendid as she ever was. She’s sitting relaxed and calm in the stiff, upright chair beside Toast’s bed, one hand resting on the curve of her still-pregnant belly. Her baby will not be a warlord, because it will never be born. Toast wants to go to Angharad, to hug her, but her body is too stiff and tired to move. Angharad smiles, warm and proud, and Toast feels tears prickle at her eyes.

“You’ve changed so much,” Angharad observes, looking about the room. It’s not just the plants, the extra beds. There are so many signs that more people use this room, that it has gone from a prison to a garden. Toast’s own things are laid out neatly by the bed, including her gun. She sees Angharad looking. 

“I’ve been learning to shoot,” she says. “Only necessary killing.” She’s annoyed that she still sounds defensive about it. 

“You should be defensive,” Angharad agrees. “The closer you live by Joe’s rules, closer you are to him.” She is as certain, as infuriating as ever. Toast thinks of all the bodies on the Fury Road, how many deaths. She believes they were necessary: how else could they have survived?

“You still argue with me,” Angharad says, watching her. “Even in your head.” Toast scowls, which turns into a reluctant smile, because she can’t deny it. “I’m still with you,” her sister tells her. “I’m still here.”

When Toast wakes, the baby is crying, wails becoming snuffles as it settles to feed. The first thing she sees is the white paint on the walls, Angharad’s words.

***

The Dag’s pregnancy is far enough along that it’s keeping her awake. The baby – warlord junior, or whatever it will be – had kicked furiously half an hour ago. Now that the Dag is wide awake, there’s no sign of further activity. She would fidget, but she knows from experience that she has already found the most comfortable position for her current state. Propped on one elbow, she watches Cheedo sleep, and broods on soil.

The Citadel’s green has been a revelation. She’d spent days watching from behind the yellowed glass of the Vault, staring rather than paying attention. Now she can go up to the heights, wander through the fields, touch and smell and wonder at the crops. She sees them with her own eyes, and with the knowledge she’s inherited from the Keeper of the Seeds.

That awareness comes in fragments. There are scraps of solid information, from the labels of the seed packets, from books, from her conversations with Keeper and her new discussions with the greenthumbs and with Corpus Colossus. Beyond that, there’s an instinct, a kinship with the growing things. She learns what she can from the hydroponics gardeners, but her heart isn’t in it. It’s the earth that calls to her.

She’s been back long enough to get frustrated with the limits of what had seemed infinite riches. The Citadel has more green than most wastelanders could imagine, but it still peters out eventually. At the edges of the fertile ground, the soil turns dusty, more rock and sand than earth. They’re trying to scratch new crops, to expand, to enrich. She’s hunted through the few gardening books in the library, demanded answers from every greenthumb in the place, and it’s not enough. Her plants won’t take, and she can’t keep risking seeds on poor soil.

“I know that feel,” says a scratchy voice from the corner of the room. The Dag looks up. The Keeper of the Seeds is at the end of the bed, perched on a pile of discarded clothes. The Dag can see the fingerless gloves on her hands and the bag of seeds tucked under her arm, though she knows that same bag is up in the plant room, its precious contents catalogued and observed and, in some cases, planted. “Earth too sour?”

“Not sour. Just bad,” the Dag tells her. It doesn’t occur to her to be surprised. Coming back from the dead is just what she would expect from the Keeper, circumstances allowing. Especially if there was gardening to be discussed. “Stones and sand, barely soil at all.” But not quite desert, which is why she’s kept trying. The Keeper hums, thinks it over.

“Keyhole,” she says at last. “The Green Place went to bog, and then we kept moving, but I’d always meant to try a keyhole garden.”

The Dag sits up, knowing a plan when she hears one.

“A keyhole?” She’s imagining a different way of digging, perhaps turning the earth round in a dip, locking it into place. The Keeper shakes her head. 

“Not like that. It’s just a name, called for someone’s memory of something. Round raised bed, basket in the middle – leave an aisle so you can get to it, every day. Feed the basket with scraps, greywater, whatever you’ve got.” The Dag is nodding, watching the mittened fingers as they draw patterns in the air: a composting basket, nutrients seeping outwards, contained by raised walls. Poor soil constantly enriched, until it can nourish new growth.

Beside her, Cheedo stirs, mumbling in her sleep. The Keeper and the Dag wait for her to settle again, aware that she’s less likely to take ghostly instruction in her stride. They lower their voices as they get down to the nitty-gritty of drainage and soil volume, tattooed and insubstantial fingers carrying half the conversation. 

***

Capable can’t sleep, despite a long day and a weary body. She’d dozed, nearly asleep, then some small noise woke her. Now she’s lying here, fully alert and annoyed about it. She has a lot of work to be done tomorrow, she needs the rest.

She must have fallen asleep, though, because she’s in the rearview cab of the old War Rig, her head back on Nux’s shoulder. He’d called the cab a bug, though not the kind you eat. 

This must be a sign of grief, she thinks, or maybe of loneliness. One kind of loneliness. She doesn’t lack love or companionship. She has her sisters, and her work with the pups, and recovering war boys, and former wretched and breeders and milking mothers. It takes time to build trust, but affection somehow comes faster, at least for her. The web of relationships sustains her, but there are still spaces in her heart, echoing gaps that make her work harder. She has grieved for Nux, wept for him, accepted his sacrifice. She thinks of his earnest eyes, a voice she couldn’t hear murmuring “Witness me”. She is entirely glad that she kept her gaze on him as the wheel span and the truck flipped. He is gone, but gone to glory, at least on his own terms.

So this can’t be real, but she’ll take it. It’s a chance too precious to be missed, however it comes, whatever it means. She slides down so they can lie face to face, as they had the first time they really spoke to each other. Remembering that moment, she reaches up to touch his lips, dry and rough with scars under her fingers. He smiles at her, more relaxed than he had been then.

“Why are you alone?” 

“I’m not,” she says, surprised. “You’re with me.” 

“No, but before. Where you were sleeping.” She doesn’t know how he knew, but that’s another thing it’s not worth questioning. “I thought you’d have someone new, brought someone else in, the way they do in the repair shop.”

“I’m not a repair shop,” she points out, though she can’t help laughing.

“No, of course you’re not, you’re much more – much more – ” He gets tangled up in his words, trying to explain how much shinier she is than even the finest garage, but her giggles are catching and now they’re both laughing. “But. You’re alone. I thought you’d be with the others – the wives, the br– I mean, the other women? Or, you know. With someone.”

“I wasn’t ready,” Capable says. She still isn’t, she thinks, though maybe she’s moving that way. “How would you feel? If I did?” She’s both curious and nervous about the answer. Nux had internalised so much of Joe’s culture. He’d accepted her arguments when she made them, ready to see it her way, but she wonders what his first thought would be. She knows she doesn’t owe celibacy to his memory; she hopes he wouldn’t have expected it.

Nux thinks for a moment, turning it over. 

“Wouldn’t mind,” he says, slowly. “What you decide is right, because it’s you doing it.” She shakes her head, smiling. “I like that you took time,” he admits. “I like that you – that you remembered me. I like that. But – ” he shrugs. “Convoy keeps moving.” 

He’s moving too, less visible than he had been a moment ago. She nods, accepting this as another gift he wants to give her. Then she thinks of something.

“Nux?” She puts out her hand to him as he fades, draws it to her heart. Then she puts her other hand over it, holding the memory doubly close. The last thing she sees of him is his smile.

***

Corpus knows he’s dreaming, because it’s too comfortable. Breathing is easy, even without his apparatus, and there’s no sand scratching him raw. He’s good at making the most of things, at getting around obstacles and abrasions, so he knows exactly what obstacles aren’t there.

He looks around this sleeping landscape, because even dreams might offer an opportunity. For what, he doesn’t specify. Self-knowledge, maybe, or simply processing a thought his waking mind has yet to resolve.

He’s in a vague but leafy space, the light tinting the world lilac but enough green coming through to suggest the Citadel gardens, or an old-world jungle. It’s a general impression, nothing too detailed. He wonders how much of this he’ll remember when he wakes up. He does expect to wake up: he has his old safeguards, suitably updated for this new Citadel regime. The most important is his own usefulness, his understanding of the systems and numbers of the old regime, how they can be put into service for the new. All his life, he has worked hard at being indispensable. His Dad had kept him safe, but even that wasn’t enough of a guarantee.

So he’s learned to find other people’s levers, to build alliances or to poke at weak spots. As he turns in the purplish gloom – and turns easily, no need for the wheels of his chair – he sees a strong figure who was all weak spots. It’s Rictus.

There is no question that Rictus is dead. A few war boys have limped back from beyond the wall of mountains, but Corpus knew his brother would not be one of them. Too many people had seen him die. He’s heard the story from multiple sources, some more tactful than others. 

The red-haired wife had sought him out to give him the details, telling him also that her own boyfriend – not the word she’d used – had caused the crash, had died historic in the same conflagration. It might have been foolish, telling him that. She isn’t a fool. She didn’t expect him to mingle his tears with hers, or to forgive the half-wit half-life at the wheel. She’d told him because she thought he had a right to know. He respects her for that, on some level, though he also thinks she was naïve to show him so much of her own workings. 

He’s thinking about Capable because meeting Rictus is going to hurt. Corpus is used to pain, physical and mental, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it. He knows he’s more likely to duck out of emotional suffering, because he has more chance of getting away with that. The physical will always catch up with him.

“All this green,” he makes himself say. “Is it your dream, or mine?” Rictus stares at him, his face coming into better focus. He looks as big and strong and abundantly healthy as he ever had. None of the gore of a movie ghost. Corpus has seen movies, before-time storytelling on reels of film, with their extravagant lifestyles and strange obsession with violence.

“Yours,” Rictus answers, after a moment. “It’s what you do.” 

At eight, Rictus had been the best big brother in the world: brave and strong, protective and so proud of his little baby brother. Corpus had built his own toy worlds, interested even then in their tiny economies of supply and demand. Looking back, Corpus thinks that perhaps that was when he started to realise that Rictus couldn’t follow the same intricacies. 

Rictus’s weak spots are there for anyone to see, but in other ways he’s strangely invulnerable. Maybe his naivety protected him. Maybe Corpus didn’t want to prod. 

He wonders how Rictus would see his own alliance with the new Citadel. The women have their own levers, some obvious. He knows Furiosa of old. Some of the developments have been predictable, others less so. The Dag wrong-foots him: he’s seen skill with plants before, but her knowledge can feel uncanny, pushing past his own tables of crop yields and experiments. 

His brother is watching him, with that familiar look of baffled pride. 

“I can see you’re understanding it all,” he says, vaguely, gesturing at the green and lilac world. “Don’t need to explain that to me, nobody needs to explain that.” 

“Did – did you want to know more about it?” Corpus is groping for what Rictus wants this time, because the boy is dead. His impulsive wants have become unreadable, even though the voice and the body language are familiar. 

“Here to say goodbye,” Rictus explains, as if he’s naming a grand mission. “Got somewhere else to be.”

“You going with Dad?” Corpus tries.

“No. It doesn’t work like that.” This time, when Rictus looks at him, there’s a curious sense that he knows much, much more than Corpus does.

“I’ll miss you,” Corpus tells him, and realises in that moment just how much that’s true.

***

The desert is blue at night, lit by a cold moon. Max often travels in darkness, because his night vision is good and because it’s a way to avoid the worst of the hot season. He goes long distances, circling the Citadel in long, aimless loops, though he wouldn’t admit that it’s any kind of anchor to him.

He’s made good progress tonight, enough to reach a familiar resting spot. He parks his car where the shadows will last longest. He’s even found a dribble of water here in the past. It’s too dark to go looking now, but he hopes to find something in the morning, or at least some dew on the rocks. He takes a careful swallow of stored water, makes sure his gun is to hand, and prepares himself for sleep.

He goes out easily, for once. His rest is deep and at first dreamless, without nightmares. When he rises to shallower sleep, the dream that comes is strangely gentle, at least while he’s dreaming it. 

He’s with Furiosa. They might be at the Citadel, or some other place, indistinct around them, because all he cares about is that they’re together. She is without her metal arm, without her corset; he’s curled close enough to feel her, soft and unguarded. Her face is relaxed and open, without strain. He feels a trembling pleasure in being allowed to see this, trusted to come so close, but it’s also so easy. There is no fear, no panic, just the marvel of touching her as they move closer. 

He can’t help murmuring when they kiss, feeling too much to hold it in. She pushes into him, shifting her leg up over his thigh. His hips are already moving forward to meet hers when he wakes, heart pounding.

It barely counts as a sex dream, but it’s left him sweating and scared and turned on, gasping at how much he wants what his sleeping mind suggested to him. Not just her body but her trust, the shared weakness of letting go and finding themselves. He can’t tell if this is a self-destructive urge or a healing one; it’s so long since he’s thought of himself as someone capable of healing. He would be breaking himself open for her, and it’s terrifying how much he wants to. 

He sits in the dark, gripping the wheel, willing his body to calm itself. Dawn is a while off, but he won’t sleep again tonight. It would make sense to travel now, in the cool of the early morning. 

His current route will take him away from the Citadel, if he sticks to it. A nudge to the wheel would change his trajectory, bringing him to a trading post he hasn’t visited in a while. It’s almost within sight of the rock spires. He doesn’t need to check his map to find them. He knows the way.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to my awesome beta, [Tyellas](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas) / [thebyrchentwigges](https://thebyrchentwigges.tumblr.com/) !
> 
>  
> 
> I'm at [lurkinghistoric](http://lurkinghistoric.tumblr.com/) on Tumblr.


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